• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Paydari Front / Jebhe Paydari / Steadfastness Front

The Paydari Front, called the Jebhe Paydari and Front of Islamic Revolution Stability in Iran and sometimes translated as the “Steadfastness” or “Endurance” Front, are a faction of ideological diehards who consider the late Ayatollah Mohammad Mesbah-Yazdi – the crocodile ayatollah – as their spiritual mentor. Controversial and reviled by Iranian moderates and reformists, the Paydari Front rose in prominence during Raisi’s term. Since the late president was a Khamenei loyalist, experts say the Paydari’s ascendance could not have happened without the consent or acquiescence of Iran’s supreme leader. As an ageing Khamenei leads a country plagued with high levels of domestic discontent and confronting serious international challenges to a snap poll, many analysts were wary of the Paydari Front’s stranglehold on power and what that could mean for Iran’s future.

The Paydari Front in its current form was founded as a political party in 2011 under hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was not a coincidence. The stability front was the result of the internal differences of fundamentalists in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government . The spark for the formation of the Stability Front was sparked in the 8th Parliament after a number of supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had a disagreement with Ali Larijani , the speaker of the parliament, and Mohammad Reza Bahnar , the then deputy speaker of the parliament, and other fundamentalist figures. Figures such as Morteza Agha Tehrani , Ruhollah Hosseinian and Hamid Rasaei , who had formed the Islamic Revolution faction in that parliament , clashed over their share of the board of directors and other fundamentalists.

The party’s ideology of strictly following the principles of the Islamic Revolution matched Ahmadinejad’s hardline conservatism. The ideology was shaped by Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, a deeply conservative cleric who taught most of the party’s founding members in Iranian seminaries and religious institutions. “He argued against elections in Iran, which he believed should simply be a religious dictatorship. He had extremely anti-American, very conservative, social values – women must wear the hijab, a very repressive, heavy use of the death penalty, that sort of thing,” explained Barbara Slavin, distinguished fellow at the Washington, DC-based Stimson Center and director of the Middle East Perspective project. “He died in 2021, but his ideas live on.”

After the death of Misbah Yazdi, the structure of the Stability Front was practically changed. Ruhollah Hosseinian and Ali Asghar Zarei have also passed away, and some other important members, including Gholamhossein Elham and Hossein Jalali, are not members of it. However, this group is still a controversial name, and many newsworthy events in Iran's domestic politics are attributed to it. In this front, there are people from the previous colleagues of the 9th and 10th governments, some members of the Islamic Revolution faction of the Majlis, some members of the Ammar headquarters and a number of other prominent political figures.

One of the characteristics of the stability front is that several jurists, such as the Guardian Council, must supervise its approvals. Therefore, three jurists "just, chronologist, scholar and familiar with the opinions and intellectual foundations of velayat-e-faqih" are present in the Jurisprudence Council of the Stable Front to precisely adapt their behavior and work to the level of velayat-e-faqih. Apart from Mohammad Taqi, Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi and Ayatollah Azizullah Khushgoqt, there is another person present in the Jurisprudence Council whose name he does not want to be mentioned, and no one knows him except the members of the Stability Front.

Mesbah-Yazdi’s ideas did not always find favor with Iran’s presidents. When moderate Hassan Rouhani came to power in 2013, he tried to marginalise the party, according to Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iran at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “But around 2019, 2020, they came out again. They took the parliament in the 2020 legislative elections and supported Raisi in the 2021 presidential election. Raisi was not an official member of the party, but he was strongly supported by the Paydari. They were very close allies. Under Raisi, the Paydari expanded its influence in the state bureaucracy,” explained Golkar.

Over the years, the Paydari Front infiltrated Iran’s state institutions, including the military and the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in what experts liken to state capture, in which a faction takes control of state institutions. “These people usually go to the military or the IRGC or the state bureaucracy as ideological indoctrinators. They go in and they teach. They have a very strong influence over the IRGC in indoctrination and political training,” said Golkar, explaining the workings of the Paydari as an “ideological pump to raise the level of ideology in the state, the military and the administration. They are pumping ideology into the veins of the regime.”

This state capture was on display during the crackdown on the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian-Kurdish woman, in September 2022. As anti-veil protests spread across the country, the regime doubled down, with Paydari parliamentarians playing a critical role in pushing through a draconian “Hijab and Chastity” law. The 2023 law increased prison sentences for “inappropriately” dressed women and introduced punishments for employers, as well as cinema and shopping mall owners, who did not enforce the dress codes on their premises.

The Iranian political landscape has been marked by a binary Reformist-Conservative configuration for decades. But the US pullout from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal effectively crushed the reformist camp, as the conservatives opposed to any deals with the “Great Satan” emerged to put a stranglehold on power. Under the hardline Raisi, Iran’s conservatives moved further right. Within the conservative camp, the ascendance of the ultra-conservative Paydari Front caught the attention of British weekly The Economist after the first round of the parliamentary election in March, which the party swept.

Differentiating between the old school “gruff conservative pragmatists” and a rising “group of ideological diehards”, The Economist noted that Paydari Front members “are to Iran what the religious hard right are to Israel”. Traditional conservatives are keenly aware of Iran’s military weaknesses compared to arch foes Israel and the United States. In the past, IRGC commanders were “ready to work with the West if they thought that doing so bolstered the regime”, The Economist noted.

“But the Paydari Front sees their earthly battle in divine terms,” the weekly observed. A messianic Shiite vision of a fight against an anti-Muslim tyrant increases the security risks in a tinderbox region reeling from the fallout of the Israel-Hamas war.

The presidential election of 2014 was the distinguishing point of this group, even with the supporters of Saeed Jalili . The primary candidate of this group was Kamran Bagheri Lankarani, the Minister of Health in the first government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Mohammad Taghi Misbah Yazdi said, "I testify in the presence of God that Lankarani is correct." This group, however, supported Saeed Jalili after the disqualification of Bagheri Lankarani.

In the presidential elections of 2016, contradictory positions of this group were also published. First, the statement of the Islamic Revolution Stability Front was published in support of Ebrahim Raisi , but Morteza Agha Tehrani announced that the stability did not officially support any option at the moment. Finally, this group supported Ebrahim Raisi.

In the presidential election of 2020, this group considered Raisi, Producti and Jalili as the best options, but finally, according to the consensus of most of the currents of the Revolutionary Front, Raisi was nominated as the best candidate. This group supported Raisi while Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi was also a candidate for the presidential election, who was the spokesperson of the Stability Front for many years.

As supreme leader, Khamenei has the ultimate say in major military decisions. His inherent caution was evident on April 13, when Iran retaliated for the April 1 Israeli bombing of its embassy compound in Damascus. Iran's missile and drone attack came after Tehran gave Israel and its allies three days of notice to protect their airspace, resulting in relatively minor injuries and damage to infrastructure. Khamenei is ageing, and the hardline takeover effort that began more than a decade ago could upset the fine balance that has kept Iran and Israel from waging a major, conventional war.

While Khamenei might be cautious on the regional front, his support for domestic hardliners have seen hawkish factions such as the Paydari Front gain disproportionate power in the nezum. “They're kind of the last man standing. The system has gotten nasty and all the other factions, the pragmatists, even some of the traditional conservative factions, have been sidelined,” said Slavin. “They appear to be the last survivors of the long political game in Iran, particularly under Khamenei.”

Golkar believes it’s all gone according to plan. “Ayatollah Khamenei put a plan in action in order to have a smooth succession. And the plan he put in action since 2019 was to make sure the state, the government, the administration is aligned ideologically with Ayatollah Khamenei. He wants his ideas, his regime to outlive himself,” he explained.

For Khamenei, Iran’s late president was the ideal successor to take on the supreme leader position, according to Golkar. “Khamenei wants to have somebody with the same mentality, the same ideology, the same political view,” he said. Raisi’s sudden death in a helicopter crash on Sunday was “a hiccup in the Ayatollah Khamenei plan. But he will find somebody that has the same political view and ideology as Raisi.”

As the country gears up for a presidential election and the appointment of a parliamentary speaker, experts believe the Paydari Front is particularly well placed to handle the backroom machinations between the political factions. “Think about the Islamic Republic as a patron-client network system. There are a lot of patrons. The Paydari is one patron with its own clients,” explained Golkar. “They are the most cohesive group and the most ideological. Because of the ideology and because of the cohesiveness, they are much more difficult to defeat compared to the other groups that are much more opportunistic.”

"Arman Melli" interviewed Dr. Ismail Garami Moghadam, a former representative of the Islamic Council and deputy of the National Trust Party, to answer these questions. Grami Moghaddam believes: "If the stability front comes to the conclusion that Qalibaf has the capability that their serious competitor, Roud, they will also accept Qalibaf's leadership. However, the Stability Front is trying to take over the chairmanship and commissions of the parliament, and it seems that they will succeed in this as well. In such a situation, it is expected that the 12th Parliament will be somewhat more moderate than the 11th Parliament, and their political composition will also be different.

For most Iranians chafing under a system that has ignored their aspirations, suppressed their demand for civil liberties, and failed to provide economic prosperity or development, the political wranglings hardly matter. “I think the young people of Iran, in particular, couldn’t care less about the political machinations at the top. They've rejected the whole system. Anyone who's ever pledged loyalty to the Islamic Republic is largely alien now to a lot of Iran's younger population. So this is an inside game, it’s played by insiders. Most young Iranians are just trying to make a living, in many cases, to leave the country if they have the requisite credentials. They will ignore the catfights at the top,” said Slavin.

But as the ideological gap between the rulers and the people widens, experts warn that a Paydari domination is unlikely to benefit the country or its long-suffering populace. “I guess the most ruthless win out, particularly in a system like Iran’s,” said Slavin. “They just managed to climb the greasy pole and that's where they are. But of course, this makes the whole system even more fragile. So while they may have a triumph now, you have to question the legitimate longevity of the system when its base is so narrow.”